Nightmares
by KitCat Italica
Summary: Bruce isn't the only one who has them. Batman/Joker slash
1. Part I: Bruce

Nightmares

Part I: Bruce

The nightmares were the worst right after it happened. Childhood terrors filled his nights, waking Alfred to his midnight screams as the afterimages of bloodied pearls and the unseeing eyes of his parents lingered behind his lids. Too scared to keep them open in the dark, for fear of the silhouetted furniture that morphs into plodding corpses and smoking gun barrels. But even more afraid of keeping them closed, for fear of what he might find underneath.

Then the dreams ebbed into the edges of his routine, as time wore on and his vivid childish imaginings matured with the rest of his world. They became just as the entirety of his life had become: worn, gray, soulless. Once when he was fourteen, he visited the back alley where it had happened, eyes stretching into a world that was far away, yet more real to him by far than reality.

The dreams came back that night in full force, though this time there was a difference: Joe Chill appeared more prominently than ever before. Each subsequent night, the killer drew his focus more and more, until it was the only face he could still see with perfect clarity. He found himself having to look at a photograph to remember his parents' faces, while Chill's mug hung in his memory with glimmering detail.

When Chill was shot outside the courtroom, his nightmares shifted gears again, this time so vague that he could never recall any detail upon waking; only a dark, brooding quality stood out to him, a hushed lull that seemed to signify something greater to come. The bats appeared in his sleep consistently now, shocking him back to consciousness with their leathery fluttering. But beyond that, he dreamed of nothing but tunnels, tunnels he would wander around in forever but could never escape, until the bats appeared in a corner he hadn't noticed before. The bats guarded the way out, and to reach the light again he would have to face them.

He learned to face them in the mountains. His deep meditation exercises in the creaking glacier hideaway purged him of all dreams, and he slowly came to hone his habit of undersleeping into a controllable trait. Instead of lying awake as he had as a child, waiting for the morning to come and chase his night terrors away, he utilized his night owl ability to train even more vigorously, achieving in greater leaps and bounds than even Ra's al Ghul had anticipated…

The nightmares came to bother him again when he returned to Gotham. The city's magnetic pull of tragedy and crime stirred up fresh edges of grief, which he dealt with by keeping his mind occupied elsewhere. His mission came to the front of his mind every time, and each time dreams of dead parents could be quietly suggested to become dreams of skyscrapers and Kevlar, punches and refreshing night air.

Until he showed up.

Once the Joker began making a regular appearance, his dreams took on a warped, disfigured quality. Scarred smiles and murderous eyes stung his vision as rising mounds of bloodied corpses piled high in the distance, consumed by fire. Rachel and Dent found their way to the top of the heaps, scorching his mind with pleading – or perhaps accusing – eyes. Soon, though, he found the bodies disappearing from his nightmares, becoming more distant, less focused, until they drifted from sight altogether. Then there was only Joker.

It was then that his dreams would take on a slightly…different quality.

Each night he would awaken to a bed soaked in sweat – and more frequently than not, more than just sweat. He would shove the vile images from his memories, roughly denying their existence and constant occurrence. Yet they picked at his brain his every waking hour, as if his subconscious was trying to tell him something…

Until finally, one night on the streets, his subconscious had apparently had enough cold shoulder treatment and betrayed his morals to their core. He was rewarded with the deepest sleep he had ever experienced since the night at the opera, with no nightmares to speak of at all. Even after a few years of mentally kicking himself yet continuing in his wicked indulgence of dreamless slumber, he still couldn't fully justify his actions.

Soon the dreams started up again, only this time, they featured someone else.

Joker was the one who was shot dead in the alleyway, green eyes blankly gazing out at him as blood pooled around his purple-clad form. Sometimes it would shift to a mob shootout, as a fountain of blood gushed from his forehead after he paused to wave a cheery hello. Even in their bed, he would try to shake the madman awake, only to find a knife buried in his back…

He wakes from these graphic horrors with gasping fits and trembling hands. He sits up in bed to free himself from the clammy trappings of sheets, and shudders for breath as he tries to purge the images from his mind. And always, no matter what the time, he feels a warm hand rub soothingly up and down his back, silently reassuring him that the man of his dreams still lives.

Even as he takes the hand in his own, he is still frightened, though not from the nightmare itself. He is frightened because he feels more terror from this particular brand of dreams than he ever did from his visions of his parents' shootings. He is frightened that now, instead of fearing his parents' deaths most, he fears the Joker's death more than anything in his life. The man now in his arms has become the most important person in the world to him.

He'll just have to hold on to this one a little tighter.


	2. Part II: Joker

Nightmares

Part II: Joker

Dreams had always fascinated him. Whenever he had them, obviously; most nights had afflicted him with an incurable insomnia for as long as he could remember, keeping him lying awake for hours, staring at the stars when all was silent. It was then that his most intriguing of thoughts, his most potent of schemes, came to life. There was nothing better to do, so he found himself most nights at 3 AM hacking away at a stolen mattress, letting his imagination run wild with what he could enact to topple the city's moral foundations. Sometimes his visions ran so grandiose, so extreme, so violently _funny_, that he'd start to giggle, then laugh in earnest, then start descending into an explosive wave of mirth and laugh himself to sleep all over again. For no other reason than because he _could_.

But when he _did_ have dreams, when Mr. Sandman finally decided to pay him a visit…it was like magic. Like the chaos of his daily musings finally meshed together with the truly impossible and the laws of physics finally decided to have the good sense to upend themselves, giving way to his idle fantasies of anarchy. No laws, manmade or otherwise, could hold sway for long in dreams. It was in the realms of dreams that the inner workings of normal people's minds could truly manifest themselves, where the completely irrelevant or illogical reigned supreme. Where fear could twist and transform even the silliest of images and send the body convulsing in terror, breaking out in shaking sweats as the cause of the nightmare vanished from memory, leaving only its effects behind. It was his perfect instrument, the constant enigma of life that imprinted upon the masses what he yearned to inflict upon them: sheer lawlessness, nonsensical nature, the ultimate chaos that transcended its messenger and unleashed itself in full force upon the frightened victims.

It always struck him as ironic that they constantly tried to deny what _he_ brought to them, when they dealt with the same tsunami of mind games every night of their pathetic lives.

Still, he had never experienced anyone else's dreams but his own, so his were what he had to go by. And what a wild ride it was. The most idle of ponderings would catch his inner eye, such as a giant fork standing on its prongs, walking towards the spoon to dance on bread crumbs. Then, a gigantic metal bowl entered, spinning on its rim as it stole the focus of the dancing cutlery, its jagged edges slicing through a trail of paperclips, cutting them to ribbons as easily as melting butter.

Once a girl with purple ribbons in her brown pigtails was swinging in a damp, gray park filled with barking Chihuahuas, until the yapping rats shut up and scurried away when he approached. She still continued swinging, looking down at her shoes as she swung back and forth, singing a haunting tune. _Babadum-babada-bum…da-dum, da-dum…_ He couldn't remember the words, only the tune. He stepped toward her as she continued unawares, until her song was suddenly silenced by the bang of a gunshot as he shot her at point-blank range, clear through the middle of her forehead. Her head slumped forward as blood trickled from her wound to the tip of her nose, the creaking of the swing the only sound that remained.

It had taken him a good two hours to recover from that one upon waking. He hadn't laughed that hard in a long while.

Laughter was always prevalent in his dreams; in some form or another, it followed him everywhere. Whether from his own mouth, or from someone else's that he soon silenced, or from some far-off, ethereal source that he could never quite grasp, or even completely silent, but still creeping up on his brain, promising him a good giggle-fest when he woke up – it never seemed to desert him. Most people would find a haunting laugh in their dreams to be frightening, but not him – he welcomed it, and feared nothing, for what is there to fear when there is laughter to be found?

A snake once showed up in his dream. It slowly coiled around his wrist, up his arm, slithering past his bare bicep with his yellow eyes glaring menacingly into his own. He simply eyed it curiously, wondering what this force of nature intended to do next. When the bite came on his shoulder, he felt the scarred corners of his mouth turn up involuntarily at the beautiful sensation of sudden pain. Then he widened the grin upon feeling the venom course through his body, shipping the poison through his veins on the racetrack of his blood flow. He closed his eyes in rapture as the tingling ecstasy wormed its way through to his extremities, then centered itself on his core, pain clouding his senses as only it could. He woke up quite refreshed, then continued to keep snakes at the back of his mind, cooking up ways to infest the city streets with thousands of the little devils incarnate. Then _his_ particular brand of venom would run rampant through the city, and _he _would be the snake, ready to give the apple of temptation to the unsuspecting Adam and Eve…

His eyes once fell from his head in a dream. He was just sitting in an unknown room, drinking a glass of orange juice, when he had felt a vibrating sensation in his right eye. The little bugger had popped out before he had had two seconds to talk it out of its escape plan, and fell to the table before him. His left eye, always wanting to follow along with his buddy, soon followed suit, and then there were two green eyes staring up at him. This had sent him spiraling into the maddest of cackles he had issued in years, for the joke his mind was playing on him just couldn't be topped: _how was he supposed to SEE his own eyeballs on the table if they had just fallen out of his head??!!_

One night, though, it all changed. A peculiar dream stood out in his memory. From the start, he could tell that there was something…different about this one. Something was off. Odd. Out of place. Because it was so _in_ place that he couldn't believe anything like this had never been dreamt of before.

An empty tunnel surrounded his dream-vision, all echoing silence. Then, a shadow moved in the distance. A fluttering… A beat of leather… Then… Then it finally showed itself to him. It was a bat. A little black bat, flying through the tunnel, towards a dark light that he felt that only he and it were aware of. He wanted to follow the bat into the light, see where it was headed, when he realized…he wanted nothing to do with the light. The bat's chosen destination must be avoided at all costs. The bat could not win. Then he found himself wanting to tear down the bat from its flight path, wrestling it to the floor of the tunnel and dragging it, flapping and screeching, into _his_ fork of the tunnel, where things had to be better. But then he found himself being flung _with_ the bat, into another part of the tunnel, arriving at a destination that neither one could have chosen, yet could have ever avoided…

He had woken up with a start, which was a first for him. And for once, he wasn't laughing. This wasn't a dream he could fully laugh at, no matter how he looked at it. It spoke of volumes greater than him, transcending beyond just his existence. It spoke of…something more. Something far more powerful. Something just out of his mind's reaches, for the moment at least. For he knew that one day it would all come clear. Such an important dream did not come along every night without meaning, no?

That meaning was the Bat. The Batman. The man who started showing up on his radar more and more. And as if he didn't see him enough in real life, he found the caped crusader turning up in his dreams. Constantly, even if he didn't belong in the picture at all. Like the unusual nighttime romp in the Ice Age, where a primal nomad fidgeted with his spear, hunting for his next mammoth meal, only to have the spear explode into confetti. Then the Batman had come traipsing through the snow, ready to deal out the next punch because "you were trying to kill the iceman". Who was to say he had? Sure, Bats had a point, when was he _not_ trying to cause innocents harm…but still, it had been quite unfair of him to punish him outright for a crime that he hadn't been planning on committing right at that moment…

The dream-murders were the best. Then they couldn't argue with him when he sliced open a woman's throat, setting her filthy lifeblood free to expose her corrupt, dimwitted way of thinking to the rest of the world. They agreed with him, and bowed down to the wave of scarlet he then proceeded to ride through the city, smashing skyscrapers in his surfing endeavor, until the man in black arrived, looming over him with a giant hand to stop the tide of blood. The red sea was parted, yet that wasn't what stopped him. What stopped him was the strange aura that the knight exuded. The strange…_heat_…

Soon his dreams were obliterated of their random musings and idle queries of why forks didn't dance with spoons. Soon all they consisted of were fights with Batman. A flash of black, a glint of silver, a glimpse of a batarang, a tensed fist meeting a striking kick, and all for the purpose of defeating the other. For completely annihilating the other, reducing them to a bloody pulp, until they begged for mercy and gave in to the other's side. For Batman to call uncle and deal out chaos just like him, or for him to surrender and transform into a model citizen for the rest of the world. But such things never happened in his dreams. Not simply because they weren't possible in real life, but because…because he just couldn't bring himself to even _imagine_ it. For that would mean an end to it all. An end to each constant tactic to one-up each other, dancing their terrific never-ending tango just as they always had, and always would. His imagination's only inhibition was causing an end to it.

His only inhibition. Anything else was fair game.

Including the…_other_ dreams about Batman.

It had certainly surprised him at first, waking up to soaked sheets after the most bizarre of dreams he had ever concocted in his life. It had featured a very armor-less Batman and himself, stripped of everything but his paint. Flesh met flesh in a very different way in these fantasies. It also struck him as, well, _hilarious_ that, after years of never giving in to such juvenile instincts, the one who had him moaning in his sleep was the one who infected his waking moments anyway. He supposed it only made sense…and yet, still made no sense to him at all. But what was life without a little uncertainty?

One night, however, all uncertainty was erased from his being. He couldn't possess any doubts about _this_ one. It was amazing how things could click into place so easily after years of angry buildup.

It was the night his dreams came true.

He supposed that after such an overload of unfamiliar (yet at the same time _sooo familiar_) sensory information, his subconscious had felt he had deserved a break. For the first night in his life, he experienced dreamless sleep, a kind of blackout that seemed almost peaceful. Lulled after the explosion that they had just set into motion. For they hadn't stopped there. The unreal monstrosity they had thrust themselves into seemed to hurtle at death speed, taking them along for the ride whether they liked it or not, unable to be stopped by even the most tender of protests. And eventually, they had both found themselves liking it. Oh yes, they liked it a _lot_, if the years spent in each others' beds was anything to go by.

It was just about that time, when they had first silently admitted to loving this new arrangement (and perhaps loving more than just that), that the dreams first came back to torment him.

No, not dreams. That was far too tame a word.

These were nightmares.

It had all started with an enormous Jack-in-the-box. Little blighters had always amused him, with their sudden surprise at its cranker when one least expected it. But yet, you couldn't argue with it, for _you_ were the one who set the events in motion, he was just the _result_ of your self-harming stupidity. Now one leapt out at him, leering as it tilted back and forth on its spring, causing him to laugh with amusement at the sight. Especially when he noticed the bleeding knife in the Jack's hand. _Who might the trickster have done in?_ he wondered. It wasn't until he noticed the bloodied corpse of his Bat on the floor next to the box did he stop laughing…

A lake in the middle of a storm. The storm of the century, of all of time. A single black gloved hand shot out of the water, breaking the surface in a desperate plea to be dragged back to the safety of air. He grabbed onto it in a death grip, struggling to lift the knight back to the shore, until the slippery hand slid out of his grip and disappeared into the depths…

A cop manhunt the next night. They shouted to each other on their radios, Gordon at the head. The black figure of a caped man raced ahead of them, trying to lose his pursuers amongst the shadows of the city that he, even now, protects. He joins the fray, not sure if it is to join the cops in catching Batsy, or to join his counterpart in his run from the pigs, only to hear a blast pierce the night air. The Batman crumples to the ground in a shower of blood. Lucky shot. Suddenly Bats is in his arms, staring back up at him with unseeing eyes that he should never be meeting with his own in that manner…

When he finally learned about Bruce Wayne, the nightmares only worsened. Now that uncanny butler masqueraded in his night visions, aiming a gun barrel at an unsuspecting brunette head, or slipping something into a single glass of champagne as his master gave a toast to his party guests. It was always the butler that did it, that's what everyone always says, _why_ hadn't Brucey listened to him?!

Or maybe a press conference. The assassination of the Prince of Gotham by a news reporter, eager for fame to the point of getting his name printed into the history books next to the word _murderer_. An act he would have normally applauded and condoned, and shoved in the pretty billionaire's face, had that face not been covered in blood…

All such imaginings are a part of his life now. He's taken to laughing them off when he sees Bruce still breathing next to him upon awakening, escalating to the point of rudely waking his lover up to his insane giggles. But that laughter's not the same as it used to be. It sounds and feels more forced now. Less sincere. For he doesn't laugh at his dreams just for the hell of it. He laughs to hide the truth. The indomitable, nagging truth that won't leave his brain alone.

The truth that now, for once in his life, he has something to fear.

* * *

**That concludes my wanderings into Joker's dreams. Well, probably not, I may fiddle with his subconscious a little more when I get my more substantial fic(s) underway.**

**And yes, the tune that the girl was singing that Joker couldn't remember the words to, is the tune he hums as he skips down the street to unmask Batman after the truck flips over. I couldn't resist. ^^**

**And I suppose this fic/continuation is dedicated to dollhouseDISASTER, for we talked a little back and forth about Joker's dreams. Plus, she's just flipping amazing with her support of my writing and B/J slash in general. Check out her work, too!!! :D**


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